Miley Cyrus is Vanity Fair’s latest cover star, and the story is a wild ride, though it’s hard to empathize with her oppressive wealth and self-righteousness.
The profile—well-written but for some reason interspersed with Cyrus’s own stream-of-consciousness personal essay—centers on her recent marriage to Liam Hemsworth, which she describes as “redefining… what it looks like for someone that’s a queer person like myself to be in a hetero relationship,” and losing her Los Angeles home after the Woolsey Fire destroyed much of Malibu last November. (Hemsworth rescued all of their animals and they currently reside in their other home, in Nashville.) That’s enough for an interesting read, but then Miley attempts to mythologize herself with a series of extremely basic declarations about sex and gender.
On marriage being “old-fashioned”:
“The reason that people get married sometimes can be old-fashioned, but I think the reason we got married isn’t old-fashioned—I actually think it’s kind of New Age. We’re redefining, to be fucking frank, what it looks like for someone that’s a queer person like myself to be in a hetero relationship. A big part of my pride and my identity is being a queer person. What I preach is: People fall in love with people, not gender, not looks, not whatever. What I’m in love with exists on almost a spiritual level. It has nothing to do with sexuality. Relationships and partnerships in a new generation—I don’t think they have so much to do with sexuality or gender. Sex is actually a small part, and gender is a very small, almost irrelevant part of relationships.”
On getting married after her home burned down, in which she literally quotes Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign slogan:
“Yeah. Without feeling like you’re putting a Band-Aid on a bad situation and saying, ‘Oh well, you know, now everything will be better.’ Because a lot of people use marriage I think maybe for a cure. But like my favorite woman in the world, Hillary Clinton, says: We’re stronger together. That’ll make me get emotional. That’s what she meant by it. Like, who gives a fuck if he’s a guy, if I’m a girl, or if he was a woman—who gives a fuck? We really are stronger together. One is the loneliest number.”
On being a queer person in a straight relationship, taken from her essay section:
Being someone who takes such pride in individuality and freedom, and being a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, I’ve been inspired by redefining again what a relationship in this generation looks like. Sexuality and gender identity are completely separate from partnership. I wore a dress on my wedding day because I felt like it, I straightened my hair because I felt like it, but that doesn’t make me become some instantly “polite hetero lady.” (PS: Straight women are badass, too.) My relationship is very special to me, it is my home. I feel less misplaced when we are in the same room, no matter where that is, but just because something changes in my relationship doesn’t mean something has to drastically change in my individuality. What Liam and I went through together changed us. I’m not sure without losing Malibu, we would’ve been ready to take this step or ever even gotten married, who can say? But the timing felt right and I go with my heart.
Later in the article, Miley promises new music. “There’s psychedelic elements, there’s pop elements, there’s more hip-hop-leaning records,” she says. “You know, in the same way I like to kind of just be genderless, I like feeling genre-less,” which leads to this damning revelation:
“Every producer I’m working with on this new record is male. There’s not a lot of female producer options for me. But it’s fun to be the female in the room that has the most say.”
Which is fine, because she has “such male energy. I think I associate with male energy more, because I maybe do feel this sense of power.”
My god, if you are Miley Cyrus, you can find a woman producer! Especially because just a few paragraphs before that, she champions herself for “challenging the system as much as anything else I’ve ever done—to have a female pop writer that says, ‘All right, I’m only going to write all my own songs. I don’t want to share lyrics with anyone else. I just want to write what I feel.’”
Apparently “challenging the system,” to Cyrus, is being the only woman in the room.
Read the full article here.